Is It Possible to Reason About Having a Child?

By

Alison Gopnik

Sept. 6, 2013 6:50 p.m. ET

How can you decide whether to have a child? It's a complex and profound question—a philosophical question. But it's not a question traditional philosophers thought about much. In fact, the index of the 1967 "Encyclopedia of Philosophy" had only four references to children at all—though there were hundreds of references to angels. You could read our deepest thinkers and conclude that humans reproduced through asexual cloning.

Recently, though, the distinguished philosopher L.A. Paul (who usually works on abstruse...